Then there was the letter from my step-mother. A letter explaining, well supposedly everything. I’m not convinced it can explain much at all really.
I should explain. It will be long, and I’m sorry.
My father died on May 1, 1998. In a town about an hour away from Edmonton, where I lived. I found out he died in July of 1998. He didn’t want me at his funeral. He didn’t want me to know he died until everything was sorted out. It was all over and done for everyone when I found out at the start of July, 1998.
The letter explains this. Three pages of neat text.
It’s hard to know where to start this. Maybe the letter isn’t the place. The letter comes in the middle of everything, and while the letter is painful, the hurt starts from way before. Alice in Wonderland insists that you should start at the beginning, carry through the middle and end at the end.
But, what’s the end? You might have said that the end was in 1998, when my father died. Except that it’s 2013, and I was in a hotel in Vancouver, watching the rain stream down my windows, overlooking the wharf, and I knew 1998 wasn’t the end, and this blue file folder with the letter made me feel like it still hasn’t ended. The muteness of the last week as I struggled tells me it hasn’t ended.
So, where might the beginning be? That is even harder. Perhaps it is in the early 1950s, when my grandmother left my grandfather, leaving behind 2 children. Perhaps it is further along in the 1950s, when my grandfather married a woman who was 6 years older than my father. Perhaps it is after than that – when my father married his first wife. Perhaps even later than that – when my father married my mother, around 1976. Maybe the beginning was in 1978, when I was born. You would think it should have started at my birth, but looking back, it seems as if the story started so much before me, and I sort of came along into the middle of it – cast unwillingly into a play filled with hurting people banging into each other.
Maybe, it starts later, in 1988 when my parents divorced, or after that, in about 1993, when my father sent me letters, and I didn’t answer him. There are so many places it could have started – there is a middle that seems to go on and on and on, and even now is still going on.
My stepmother seemed to think, back in 1998, when she wrote this letter, that it started in 1988, when my parents started divorcing. My stepmother says hard things. Terrible things really. She calls my mother mercenary and grubbing and power hungry, and these are in fact truthful things. They are fair ways to describe my mother; accurate, if painful, ways.
She says that my father said I was my mother’s daughter, that he would have rather died alone than have me there. She says that he felt alone, that he wanted nothing to do with me. In every place in the letter, and there are several, I am referred to with her. There we are, a single horrible entity, in brackets. In her mind we are exactly the same person. In my father’s mind, we were exactly alike. He hated me. He wrote me out of his life. Said he wanted nothing to do with me. Said that he had tried when I was younger, tried again later and I wasn’t worth it.
It is true, you know. At the age of 13 or thereabouts, I did decide to not answer the two letters my father sent me. I don’t know, maybe there were more. I have two. I read them as an adult and I can hear the longing in his voice. 13 year old me? I don’t know. Maybe she was horrible and selfish. I am inclined to think that she was 13.
So, there I was. A mother who was unstable, me trying to keep some sort of peace, while trying to find myself. Slightly self absorbed, like every 13 year old. Human and frail and unable to see the longer game. Certainly so hurt by what had happened to me that I was unable to extend any sort of grace to my father. So I didn’t answer the letters. I didn’t ever tell him to never talk to me again, but I didn’t answer the letters. My mother wasn’t rushing out to buy international stamps to facilitate the answering, and would have found ways to make my life difficult if I had answered. So yes, I didn’t talk to him from the time I was about 13 until he got in touch with me when I was 18.
I met him then, and I thought it went well. Not stellar, we didn’t stay in touch and he certainly didn’t tell me he was living in Edmonton. He said that he couldn’t afford to continue paying child support, and I knew damn well what was going to happen if I went home and told my mother that I offered to let my father stop paying child support. The adult in me understands that it was never in my power to override the Court of Queen’s Bench, and that I should never have even been asked. I was still a child, caught between two warring factions. He asked if I needed the money and I said that I was going to University. He asked if I could wait to go. What was I supposed to say? It was June. University started in September. I wanted to go.
But, for these 15 years I have held on to a sort of peaceful feeling from that meeting. I have held on to the idea that my father in some way loved me, and knew I loved him. He said that he wished things had been different, and I agreed. I didn’t think he hated me. We met on a Saturday in a food court, and then later in the week at a restaurant. I thought it was ok. Not great, but for 15 years I have held on to that meeting a year before his death as the only sort of good bye I was ever going to get, the only chance I had to love my father.
We didn’t fix anything, we didn’t resolve anything, but the meeting has stayed with me, I saw him perhaps 3 times between the time I was 8 and the time he died. After we met when I was 19 he sort of disappeared from my life like he did when I was 8. If he got in touch again, it would have been on his terms, I had no way to get a hold of him. He died less than a year later.
When people asked me if I hurt that he was dead, I mostly just said that I had always hoped that maybe when I was an adult we could have some sort of relationship and I wished that chance wasn’t gone. I never dreamed it was gone because he hated me.
***
When I first wrote this post, last week, I was very kind to everyone involved. It’s my nature, I suppose, to try and see the best in people, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt that I would want. Finally I stopped trying to be reasonable. Instead I spent the last week as a wee small girl, trying to understand. It’s just completely not understandable.
I’ll step back. If our family has one job, it is this: When everything has fallen to shit, and it is 2 am and pouring rain, you can knock at your parent’s door, and they have to let you in. It’s a law, like gravity; a single truth like Fermat’s Last Theorem. It is the way things should be. That’s all there is to it.
When your marriage has fallen apart, when you have lost your job, when every single last person in the world hates you, and maybe they have good reason to. When you need a place that is a refuge, when you need a place to heal, you go home. In a fundamental sense, home is where our parents are. Home is where they loved you first, home is where they will always love you. Our blood can be many things to us, but it seems to me that they have a chief duty and obligation at 2 am: to open the door and let us stream water on their carpet. To find us house room and love us into standing up again.
The truth is that no parent ever did that for me. It just never happened that way. Home has never once in my life been a safe place for me. I have no home. I have, over the last 10 or so years, learned to cope with the fact that my mother hates me. I can blame it on mental illness, I can say that maybe it isn’t even her that hates me, maybe it’s just the disease, but it’s truth. My mother hates me. My mother would, if I permitted it, go out of her way to hurt me. She would cut and destroy with words and she would seem to enjoy it.
It hurts. In some deep and primordial way, cutting me into a million pieces. I think I’m lovable. I think I’m the sort of daughter most parents would be proud of. I think I’ve done reasonably well. I think I’m worth loving.
Last week I was silent, mute. Stunned, I suppose, but wounded in a way that I had forgotten anyone could hurt me. I went through this with my mother. That soul searing pain that I would never be good enough. And all last night, late at night in my bed, sobbing. I’m still not enough for a man who barely knew me.
And my parents hate me.
I’m sorry.
I love you beyond measure.
oh mrs spit, you have endured and endured and endured. More than any little girl, young woman, mother to be, mother, bereaved mother ever should have. I’m so sorry.
I’m so sorry.
Mrs. Spit, you have had so many losses in your life that I cannot help you with. I don’t understand the depths of your pain, can only imagine because I have not endured these things. I never know the words to say to comfort you.
I know this. My parents did not like me, and for years I struggled with that, trying to fix it, trying to make things good. It would work, and then something would happen. What I never had was their benefit of the doubt. I never once endured a difficult time in my life and had my parents behind me saying ‘This is not you…we’re here…’ Instead, what I got was a laundry list of reasons why every bad thing that happened to me was my own fault. There came that day when I looked at the situation and realized that it was not going to change. I said, “My parents do not like me,” I said it out loud. And once said, my energies went else where. I heard it said forever after that I had turned my back on my parents. Perspective is a painful thing. These are painful times for you and we find ourselves looking to be comforted. I still sometimes find myself curled up on the end of the sofa, wishing, wishing, impossibly, for that. My parents are both dead as well. They’re gone. But still, within us lies that child, who wants to be seized up and hugged fiercely. We want to hear someone say, “You are good, and I love you beyond all measure, never mind what anyone else says…” I understand this, Mrs. Spit.
Unfortunately, still, despite this, I STILL have no words to help the situation. I am so sorry.
It’s ok, Mrs. Spit. Just know that through your deeds and words that you have accumulated at least dozens of other homes all over the place that would allow you to come stream water on a carpet at 2am if you needed it!
I am SO sorry. For you, mostly. But also for your parents who missed the opportunity to enjoy and love their wonderful daughter.
I love you, and I hardly know you.
(((HUGS))) I am sorry, Mrs. Spit. You deserved much better. Your parents probably deserved much better from their parents too, from the sounds of it. It is a sad thing when history repeats itself ad nauseum within families in such a negative way. I see certain stories replay themselves over & over again among the generations within my own family and dh’s, and it makes me wonder how we can break those patterns.
I am glad you have the memories of that last meeting with your father.
In truth, you say the letter was written by your father’s wife. She is hardly a credible source of information and probably carried alot of anger and resentment towards both your Mom and you! Was the letter written and mailed to you or was it jammed in that blue file folder and forgotten? Perhaps it’s a folder that should just have been destroyed and not delivered? Why was it delivered now? What was the point of it? What good came of it?
Most 13 year olds are pretty full of themselves…. and yes you were very angry. Angry and confused and really, really hurt. Their breakup was not about you; it was about them.
I do not believe your Mother and Father hate/hated you, each other with out a doubt(!) but not you. You can choose to forgive them or you can carry that grief to your grave.
Mrs. Spit. you have a home. A beautiful wonderful home. It is one you share with Mr. Spit. And it is full of love and warmth for and from the person you love. You are blessed.
I’m sorry. And I love you as well.
I do not know you, but from what I have read over the last years I can see that you have a loving home that you created and also so many more welcoming homes that you have cultivated by being a good person, aunt and friend. I’m so sorry your parents have never been the refuge they should have been.
Hugs. And a warm bed, with someone waiting for you in it.
It too was thinking look at the source of the letter.
The first 18 months I was married was a circle of Hell for me. The end of that time period, I went to a number of funerals. February, my mother-in-law’s only sibling (a sister), March my father-in-law, April was a month of reprieve, May my husband’s best friend from high school, June my father’s. The ‘hardest’ and ‘worst’ funeral was not my father’s (I was close and love him), nor was it my father-in-law’s (which was unexpected, and my FIL was best man in our wedding). Nor was it the ‘young death’. It was my MIL’s sister (she was the oldest, and in the poorest health for the longest time of all of the deaths). Her story sounded eerily like part of your story. She left her husband and 4 children when they were 5,6, 8, and 9. She later had another child (who they were not even able to locate to tell). Of the children she walked away from, she never saw the 3 boys again. 2 of those boys came to the wake and funeral. 1 flew over 1000 miles to come, but couldn’t handle it and stayed close by with his wife. The piss and vengeance and mean things that the two stepdaughters (who became stepdaughters well into adulthood) said to those two men was abhorrent. The blame they openly spoke of that it was their fault, everything from the divorce to never having contact with their mother. They were 5 and 9 the last time they spoke with her. No 5 or 9 year old is ‘responsible’ for the things they were being said was their fault. Their mother had never reached out to contact them again. It was awful. It was so bad, the sermon for the largest part was about how we should treat each other on this Earth, and that there is never a place for spite and vengeance. It was the most difficult funeral, with the least resolve, that I have ever attended. That I ever wish to attend.
Maybe, just maybe, your father was trying to protect you the one last time he could on this Earth. If your stepmother has the spirit to send you that type of letter, then she might have said it. Your dad did reach out to you. No matter infrequently.
Your parents did not and do not hate you. You were a child born to people who had no idea what to do with any child, let alone one who was talented, perceptive and intelligent as you are. Ironic as it is, your grandparents who loved you dearly and thought the world of you, never understood their own children, but somehow managed to figure it out that you were special. I can’t really speak for your mom but I know your Dad was damaged early in life when his mother left and he never recovered from that. His motto in life was “leave everyone before they can leave me” If your stepmother thinks for one minute that she would have escaped that fate…it was only because he didn’t leave long enough. Your father was my brother and I loved him but I didn’t like what he did to people. He probably didn’t much like me either. It is not my problem and it certainly is not yours. You were a child. It is not your place to fix the world or your family. Your stepmother was angry and bitter and you must remember she saw us though his eyes. Not wanting us to know he was dead, was just so typical of him. Just plain mean and petty. I can’t tell you really anything to make it better, just that he was a child who just never grew up and was forever the little boy who lost his mother.
Like debby earlier, I understand something of this pain. My mother hates my very existence and has done so from the day I was born (my earliest memories are of her telling me what a waste of existence I was, later she would add how it was too bad she was Roman Catholic – otherwise she would have aborted me). I have both the physical and mental scars that attest to her hatred.
Like you, home has never been a shelter for me either. It’s an odd thing in a world that celebrates family – to have none, at least, none that celebrates your existence.
I’m sorry that you know this pain, along with all the other categories of agony with which life has seen fit to make you familiar. Despite my dim understanding of this particular loneliness, I have no words of comfort to offer beyond the trite. Nevertheless, I hope it helps a little.
I’m sorry Mrs Spit. It hurts to read this, to think of the child in you that hurts. I think of my own daughter and try to imagine her feeling so unloved and unsafe in her family and…the pain of that thought could split me in two. You are right: families have one job, and I’m so sorry yours failed you.
It sounds like your parents are two extremely flawed people – who could not make any relationship work…not even the one with their only child. Did your father hate you? How could he? He didn’t even know you.
I don’t know how much of your father’s wife’s prejudices are in that letter, but it doesn’t really sound like you believe she is exaggerating. While it may have been more comfortable to believe that you and your father were on your way to a halfway decent relationship, you obviously no longer have that option. I guess your best option from here is to try and understand what made him so incapable of relating to you, and try to make some peace with it. But, if your parents hate you, it actually has nothing to do with you, because that decision was made long before you were fully formed as a person.
P.S. You have a home now.
P.P.S I’m glad you decided to put this out in the light.
Oh Mrs Spit.
I wish I could hug you.
I can only send hugs.
Lot of wisdom here, Mrs. S.
Out of that awful parenting you managed to be a loving and successful woman. Your parents were selfish and wrong.
Regarding the letter, I think you have to consider the source. Your stepmother clearly has her own agenda.
Mrs Spit – also sending you hugs from here.
You have such a beautiful description of family and it hurts to read how you were denied the love that should be there for every child. It also makes me think of my students – some of whom are going through terrible family break ups right now.
And it makes me wonder about how we grow into who we are. Some of the most amazing people I know came from such difficult backgrounds. They had to have courage and grit and be willing to be vulnerable and keep opening the door to love, in order to be the incredible people they are today. Something about the pain and hardship they endured brought forth these things in them – whereas some who go through this pain and hardship do not develop this way. Then, there are those who have an apparently ‘better’ environment, but still make bad choices, or turn inwards.
Knowing a bit more about your background, and the part of you that I know from your writing (and meeting you once!) – I find it even more incredible and graced that you are the wonderful person that you are.
It also really, really makes me wonder how you came to faith in a loving God (loving Father) when that was not your experience growing up. There must have been some others in your life to help nourish love for you, in you, and around you. I am grateful to those people and what they could provide, since those who should have been there for you first were not, or perhaps not able to be.
You can’t pick your family, unfortunately. But by the looks of here, you have great friends. You are loved. Try to remember that. XOXOXOXO.
I feel your pain through your words and this may sound out of line but it was my first reaction so I am going to share it.
Gabriel is lucky to have you as his mother.
A loving mother who has immortalised him with her words, who has nurtured his memory and the place he holds in her heart.
A mother who held him as long as she could and then sent him to peace but loves him everyday.
And a mother who shares her precious son with others so they can love his memory too.
That’s a pretty good mother. This is what you are.
And seeing as the first comment was from Mr S I am thinking you are a pretty good wife too.
I too have had some run in with people who were meant to love unconditionally but are flawed and faulty and so can’t follow those rules. Screw em
Their shit is for them to deal with. They can’t afford the rent in my head anymore.
Come knock on my door at 2am. There will be wine and a dry towel.